Problem
Solving Advent of Code 2017, today (Day 11) I ran into an interesting problem. We are on a (flat topped) hex grid, and we walk around. Question: how far did we get from the starting position? In short: what is the distance between two arbitrary hexagons in a hex grid?

Solution
I’ve never worked with a hex grid before so I had to do some research. I found an excellent blog post here: Hexagonal Grids. This post is interactive, so don’t forget to move your mouse over the figures.

I figured out that I needed cube coordinates; that gives the easiest way to calculate the distances. Here is a code snippet in Kotlin:

I’ve heard lots of good things about C# but I’ve never tried it. I saw some codes and thought “fine, it’s like Java”. As I also have Linux on my primary machine, I was not interested in Microsoft technologies. However, a few years ago .NET Core was open sourced and it reached version 1.0 (now it’s 1.1). It’s a cross platform framework and it works well under Linux too, so I thought it was time to try it. Project Mono has also existed for a long time but .NET Core comes directly from Microsoft.

Create a folder for holding your C# projects, e.g. ~/CSharpProjects (optional), and create a folder for a sample project (e.g. ~/CSharpProjects/Sample). Enter it, and create a source file called hello.cs with the following content:

Now let’s use the official command-line tools. You can also delete the file “hello.exe”. I suppose you are in the project’s folder. Issue the following command:

$ dotnet new console

It creates a project file (with extension .csproj), and a sample file called Program.cs . As we already have hello.cs, Program.cs is not needed so simply delete it (leave only one source file, but it doesn’t matter which one). Then,

According to the docs, “dotnet publish compiles the application, reads through its dependencies specified in the project file, and publishes the resulting set of files to a directory. The dotnet publish command’s output is ready for deployment to a hosting system (for example, a server, PC, Mac, laptop) for execution and is the only officially supported way to prepare the application for deployment.”

Programming C# with VS Code is a joy. When you open a .cs file, the editor offers immediately to install the official C# extension. In order to execute a program, install the Code Runner extension. Then, add the following lines to your user settings:

I decided to learn Scala as a new language. I’ve heard a lot of good things about it. I looked at some basic stuffs in it and it seems to be a cool language. It’s based on the JVM, thus it stands on the shoulders of giants :)

I found an excellent book for learning it called “Scala for the Impatient” (Amazon link). Here you can download the first 9 chapters legally, and they nicely cover the basics that let you get started. I just finished the first chapter (13 pages) and it teaches you a lot. At the end of each chapter there are exercises, so you can test your knowledge and you have a feedback of your progress. I think a programming book without exercises is worthless.

Last week I started to work with the book “Programming in Scala” 2nd ed., which is written by the author of the language. I read the first four chapters (116 pages) but it goes in all directions. It talks about advanced stuffs at the beginning and it doesn’t explain the basics well. After the four chapters I had the impression that I still know nothing about Scala…

“Scala for the Impatient” seems better to my taste. I should buy the complete book.